Troubled Water: The Wet Death Image as an Anglo-American
Response to the Great War

From biblical times to the era preceding World War I,
material and spiritual factors combined to impart a powerful symbolic value to rain/water;
its life-sustaining associations were the most important to be recorded in the Bible in
the accounts of the Israelites' struggle to survive the parched lands of Palestine. But
the Bible also chronicled the Flood, a torrent of cataclysmic proportions that presented
an altogether different and more complicated view of rain—at once destructive and
cleansing, purifying and cathartic. Both images were passed on as the literature of
Western culture evolved, particularly in the writings of English-speaking authors, though
rain/water's positive, nourishing qualities remained clearly dominant. The radically
different material circumstances and spiritual convulsions wrought by the Great War
transformed rain/water's meaning from an ambivalent symbol most often associated with life
to one primarily associated with death. The amputation of rain/water's life-giving
qualities was a significant development which needs to be understood in the historical
context of the war and immediate post-war periods.

"Our civilization was about to reverse itself, or some
new civilization about to be born from all that our age had rejected . . . ,"
prophesied W. B. Yeats in the aftermath of World War I (qtd. in Hunter 343). Published in
1920, the opening stanza of Yeats's "The Second Coming" captures the uncertainty
and dread of the post-war period:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (342-43)

As Yeats's poem suggests, the longevity and sheer brutality
of the War devastated Europe. This devastation manifested itself in a variety of ways in
the literature of the period. One way in which it did so was the characterization of
rain/water. Previously depicted as a central symbol of life and death, rain/water was
associated predominantly with death by many wartime and post-war American and British
authors. The shift is peculiar in that positive rain/water imagery might have been helpful
to members of the war generation when they faced the hard questions raised by the war.
Rain/water imagery, with its cleansing and rebirth components, was specifically well
suited for aiding those who confronted the issues of mortality and salvation. The war
generation's rejection of rain/water's positive qualities, in circumstances in which those
positive qualities might have been invoked to great advantage, makes the shift in
rain/water's meaning all the more compelling. While the war experience did not quite
"reverse" rain/water's symbolic meaning, it did—as Yeats's "blood-dimmed
tide" illustrates—signifi-cantly alter the way in which the symbol was employed. To
be clear, the change rain/water imagery underwent was by no means absolute. The nature of
cultural history, with its reliance on selective evidence, precludes such absolute
generalizations. Still, while there may be exceptions, a broad reading of printed sources
reveals a clear shift to rain/water's negative death associations. Examples of, and
explanations for, the evolution of this cultural process are the subject of this essay.

Rain/water's symbolic life-giving qualities are rooted in
material circumstances. Humans—indeed all living matter—need water to survive.
Agriculture, which sustains most human societies, is dependent upon rainfall. The fecund
associations of rain/water and life were firmly established in the Bible. Exemplifying a
desert-people's need for rain, the Hebrews projected upon their God the capacity to
provide water. In Isaiah 44:3, the Lord promises: "I will pour water on the thirsty
land" (Oxford Bible). In the New Testament, water is assigned the sacred role of
cleansing the soul in the sacrament of baptism. The Book of John records that when asked
about rebirth—"how can a man be born when he is old?" (New Catholic Edition,
John 3:3)—Jesus replies, "Except a man be born again of water and the Spirit, he
cannot enter into the Kingdom of God" (John 3:5). The major exception to this pattern
is the story of the Flood. Even the Flood story has a positive dimension and can be read
as a cleansing of the earth, the spiritual rebirth of a decadent society. On the whole,
though, it must nevertheless be viewed as one of a number of biblical examples of the
rain/water symbol's destructive subcurrent.

The war generation inherited an ambivalent biblical and
literary tradition which emphasized the life-giving qualities of rain/water,1 while
acknowledging the symbol's potentially destructive function. The question arises, why did
that same generation bequeath a pattern of imagery which identifies rain/water almost
exclusively with death? A number of material conditions help account for the frequency in
which rain/water and death are linked. First, Germany's introduction of submarine warfare
meant that writers who sailed to the Continent actually faced the possibility of dying in
water. This was a dramatic break with both America's and Britain's historic relationship
to the sea. Sea barriers offered America a natural defense against invasion. In Britain, a
similar relationship took on a mythic dimension. Once regarded as a buffer zone shielding
Arcadian England from Continental invaders, and more positively as the domain which
guardian angels had bequeathed to Britannia, the ocean was transformed into a killing zone
by submarine warfare. The apex of the crisis was reached in 1917, when for several months
one out of every four British merchant vessels leaving port was sunk in the sinister seas.
Recalling the U-boat campaigns, Vera Brittain wrote, "We were certainly surrounded by
a sea which held terrors" (311). The perils of sea travel were made abundantly clear
to the British nation when Lord Kitchener drowned on 5 June 1916, after the ship on which
he was traveling struck a mine. As a prominent historian notes, Kitchener "was
generally regarded as the greatest British soldier still in active life: conqueror of the
Sudan and of South Africa, Commander-in-Chief in India . . . ruler of Egypt" (Taylor
51). The drowning of such a national symbol made a great impression on the British public.
Brittain personally recalls quite clearly the "day the news came through of
Kitchener's death in the Hampshire. The words 'Kitchener Drowned' seemed more startling,
more dreadful, than the tidings of Jutland" (272). She goes on to imagine what
Kitchener's drowning meant to the British people: "So great had been the authority
over our imagination of that half-legendary figure, that we felt as dismayed as though the
ship of state itself had foundered in the raging North Sea" (272).

A second explanation lies in everyday trench life, which in
most seasons was something of a wet nightmare. The Allied trenches were "dug where
the water-table was the highest and the annual rainfall the most copious" (Fussell
47). Consequently, the trenches were usually wet and sometimes flooded. Surveying his
surroundings, one soldier wrote, "There is a mean depth of two feet of water"
(qtd. on 48). Constantly wading through the trenches, many soldiers developed circulatory
problems in their feet, or as it was more commonly known, trench foot. Two of the most
famous trench poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, have linked especially bad
experiences with wetness. In a private letter Owen oddly recalled that "the worst
incident was one wet night" (164). Sassoon is more explicit in joining "wet
days" with an apocalyptic vision:

On wet days, the trees a mile away were like ash-grey smoke
rising from the naked ridges, and it felt very much as if we were at the end of the world.
And so we were: for that enemy world . . . had no relation to the landscape of life. (qtd.
in Fussell 136)

The wetness endemic to trench life found an almost literal
representation in the language used to describe modern industrial warfare. Chlorine gas
attacked the lungs, and thereby drowned soldiers in their own blood. Likewise, during an
artillery barrage, shells came down with such concentration as to resemble a violent
thunderstorm. Owen: "Never before has the Battalion encountered such intense shelling
as rained upon us as we advanced in the open" (164). Advancing in the darkness, the
speaker of Isaac Rosenberg's "Returning, We Hear the Larks" realizes that
"Death could drop from the dark," much like a raindrop (Silkin 120). The
figurative wetness of modern industrial warfare no doubt combined with the literal wetness
of the trenches to leave many macabre memories on soldiers' minds. This sort of
"memory" was Eliot's nightmare as an April shower unearths the recently buried
war dead in "The Waste Land."

A third explanation for the motif lies in the unfortunate
relationship which developed between Allied offensives and the weather. Many offensives
were foiled by storms. Vera Brittain wrote of

the terrific gales and whipping rains of the late autumn,
which turned the shell-gashed flats of Flanders into an ocean of marshy mud that made
death by drowning almost as difficult to avoid as death from gun-fire. . . . (390)

In several cases, just as Allied soldiers were going
"over the top," it began to rain. The rains of death spawned rumors on the
British side that "the Germans . . . could make it rain when they wanted it to"
(Fussell 48). Indeed, at the "Battle" of Passchendaele, it seemed as if the
Germans had willed the rain. The six weeks preceding the offensive had been
"magnificent summer weather." The weather held for the first day of the assault,
but during the crucial first night a storm struck. A British officer recalled:

That evening heavy and persistent rain fell. It was
heartbreaking. The ground absorbed the wet like a sponge but kept it close to the surface.
. . . Grim it was indeed. . . . Several men were drowned in the water or smothered in the
mud. . . . Those who saw it will never forget that battlefield in the wet: as far as the
eye could see a vision of brown mud and water . . . . (Falls 300-04)

These conditions help account for the spate of rain/water
death associations in Great War literature. The majority of the images can be divided into
two categories. The death by water/drowning image can be traced to submarine and chemical
warfare, whereas the rain_death association was a product of the bleak
"battlescape" of the Western Front. Being static, the front area was pounded by
artillery shells for years to the point where it resembled a huge mud pit. Rainfall added
to the mud and gloom, and, along with artillery shells, sometimes unearthed buried
corpses. The painter Paul Nash described this unique and horrible "battle-
scape" as "unspeakable, godless, hopeless." Similarly, the death by
water/drowning image was a product of unique Great War conditions. Pre-Great War naval
combat consisted of surface engagements and death by cannon fire, whereas submarine
warfare led mostly to drowning. These unique circumstances help explain why the transition
of rain/water imagery from a symbol of life to one of death took place between 1914 and
1918, rather than in a previous era of predominantly naval warfare. Finally, it should be
stated that while distinct in a limited sense, rain and water images are related and
complementary. The images were often coupled by authors in an attempt to convey wet death
as a crucial metaphor for the way in which the Great War devastated European culture.
Within the broad cluster of rain/water images there are, of course, different usages. For
the most part, British authors were likely to employ the metaphor with a greater sense of
urgency than their American counterparts. Since this is the case, a comparative
methodology along national lines will be used to enhance the structure and clarity of the
essay.

Ambrose Bierce's short story, "An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge," was a key piece of national literature for American novelists
concerned with both World War I and water imagery. Bierce fought in the American Civil War
and later mastered a sort of shock fiction in which the protagonist's woes are compounded
as irony is added to injury. In "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the
protagonist, Peyton Farquhar, stands upon a railroad bridge waiting to be hanged.
Miraculously, a plank in the bridge breaks; Farquhar plummets into the river and begins to
swim to safety. Several times, he dives deep and then surfaces in a pattern fraught with
baptismal connotations. Farther downstream, he wades out of the river and then heads
homeward. As Farquhar's escape seems complete, the river appears to have been his savior.
In this way Bierce neatly captures a national fixation. From Thoreau's pond to Twain's
Mississippi, the American imagination has been fascinated by the promise of bodies of
water. Even as disconsolate a writer as T. S. Eliot had an affection for bodies of water
(Ackroyd 22). The importance of "An Occurrence" lies in the way in which it
anticipates a break with this tradition. For as the story ends, there comes a
"stunning blow upon the back of the neck," and "Peyton Farquhar was
dead" (Bierce 17-18). By writing a detailed sketch of the imaginative flight of a man
about to be executed, Bierce implies that water imagery's redemptive qualities are a sham.

The mass slaughter and trench warfare of the American Civil
War was in many ways a military preview of the Great War. So too, the irony which scars
Bierce's fiction anticipates that which emerged from the Great War. Unfortunately, the
bloody lesson of the American Civil War was lost on Continental Europeans, the majority of
whom dismissed the American experience as an aberration. As if in protest of the
Europeans' failure to heed his warning, Bierce vanished while on a trip to Mexico in 1913.
One year later, the world, minus Bierce, plunged into world war.

Only after the war did American writers acknowledge Bierce's
warning. Significantly, both Dos Passos's and Hemingway's war novels contain false river
escape scenes. In Three Soldiers, Andrews flees a labor crew by diving into the Seine,
only to be recaptured in a later scene in which his final vision of a colorful flag on a
riverboat serves as a sort of freedom tease. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry also
escapes execution in a baptismal-like river plunge. But Frederick's redemption by water
proves to be false as eventually his lover dies, and Frederick realizes this is a world in
which "they killed you in the end."

A number of critics have shown that rain imagery plays a
crucial role in conveying the sense of doom which is at the core of A Farewell to Arms
(Cowley xvi). Passages in the novel contain phrases like "wet dead leaves"
(Hemingway 163).2 and sequences such as "He looked very dead. It was raining."
As Frederick falls in love with Catherine, the rain_death association becomes even more
pronounced. Rather than the hope and thankfulness with which biblical authors greeted
falling rains, Catherine is overcome with fear: "I'm afraid of the rain because
sometimes I see me dead in it" (126).3 Her fears prove justified, but before
Catherine dies, Frederick has some harrowing experiences of his own. Caught in the hectic
Italian retreat from Caporetto, he yearns for Catherine, and the poem "Western
Wind" comes to mind. The original medieval poem reads:

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again! (Bain et al. 531)

This allusion concisely illustrates the way in which the
positive aspects of rain imagery were lost on the war generation. In the medieval version,
the speaker, who is on a boat, imagines the Western Wind bringing on a "small
rain" storm. This will, he hopes, force his ship back to port and thereby reunite him
with his lover. But in A Farewell to Arms it was not the small but the "big rain down
that rained," and "It rained all night" (Hemingway 197). Instead of
reuniting the lovers, rain in the modern version imperils. If the ship is deluged, the
speaker will drown.

Similarly, in Three Soldiers, Dos Passos demonstrates the way
in which earlier perceptions of water imagery were altered by the Great War experience.
But rather than poetry, Dos Passos alludes to mythology. Andrews is "staring" at
his reflection in a "puddle" when "Absently, as if he had no connection
with all that went on about him, he heard the twang of bursting shrapnel." Steel
pierces flesh as Andrews is wounded. "A feeling of relief came over him. His legs
sunk in the puddle . . . from somewhere a little stream of red was creeping out slowly
into the putty-colored water" (193).4 Thus in a scene which might be entitled
"Narcissus Meets the Industrial Age," the novel's hero bleeds in water.

While Dos Passos revives a classical myth with wet death
imagery, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, creates a modern myth which ends in a
bloody pool of water. Gatsby is mythical in that he fashions an honorable, if fictitious,
upbringing from his criminal past. No one is quite sure who Gatsby really is; he is
rumored to be a relative of the Kaiser's. First-person narrator Nick Carraway encounters
the Gatsby figure at a party. After conversing about their shared war experience, Nick
concludes: "We talked for a moment about some wet, gray little villages in
France" (47). Thus, from the beginning wetness is associated with the Great War in
Nick's mind. At the end Gatsby is murdered on a raft in a swimming pool: "The touch
of a cluster of leaves revolved [Gatsby's corpse] slowly, tracing, like the leg of
transit, a thin red circle in the water" (163). Before his son's funeral, Gatsby's
father "spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way" (175). The cortege is led
by a "horribly black and wet" hearse. The funeral service is performed in
"thick drizzle" (175). During the service, Nick recalls, "Dimly I heard
someone murmur 'Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on'" (176).

In the battlefield tour scene in Tender Is the Night,
Fitzgerald uses both rain and water images in expressing wet death as a metaphor for the
Great War. As the passage shifts from rain to water imagery, it demonstrates their
complementary nature and argues for their coupling under the concept of wet death imagery.
Surveying a Great War battlefield, a character uses a stream for geographical orientation.
"See that little stream," he states, "we could walk to it in two minutes.
It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying"
(55-56). As the characters leave this battlefield, "A thin warm rain was falling on
the new scrubby woods and underbrush and they passed great funeral pyres of sorted duds,
shells, bombs . . . abandoned six years in the ground"(57). They soon notice a
"sea of graves." Then "the rain was coming down harder." Reflecting on
the tour of the Great War battlefield, one character concludes, "Altogether it had
been a watery day" (58).

While the American war novelists—Hemingway, Dos Passos, and
Fitzgerald—employ the motif, a comparison with the British trench poets—Owen, Sassoon,
and Blunden—reveals that British wet death imagery has a greater, more evocative, force.
In part this is a function of medium, as poetry, more than prose, relies on compression.
Yet, national explanations are plausible too. The unevenness may be explained by Britain's
war experience being more traumatic than America's. While the British Expeditionary Force
fought from 1914 through 1918, the A. E. F. saw only a few months of heavy fighting. The
authors' personal experiences mirror their respective national ones. Hemingway and Dos
Passos were non-combatant ambulance drivers. Fitzgerald posed as a member of the
"front generation"(Kazin 391-92), but actually spent the war at a stateside post
neglecting his soldierly responsibilities while working on his first novel. In contrast,
the British trench poets fought some of the war's bloodiest battles and were mentally
scarred in the worst way. Ivor Gurney "died in a mental hospital in 1937, where he
had continued to write 'war poetry,' convinced that the war was still going on"
(Fussell 74). Finally, while Bierce had in a sense prepared the American war novelists for
the limits of watery salvation imposed by modern warfare, the British trench poets had no
such forewarning. Rather the national literature with which they went to war left them
defenseless. One text in particular stands out. Published in 1896, William Morris's The
Well at the World's End combines chivalrous quests, wounded knights, and rejuvenating
waters in a pattern similar to that which appears in Tennyson's "Morte
d'Arthur." According to one scholar, the protagonist of the tale, Prince Ralph, is
trying to find a magic well at the world's end, "whose waters have the power to
remove the scars of battle wounds" (Fussell 136). The impact of Morris's work upon
the war generation was enormous: "There was hardly a literate man who fought between
1914 and 1918 who hadn't read it and been powerfully excited by it in his youth"
(135). The force, then, with which British authors employ wet death imagery can be
understood as a reaction against Morris's coupling of martial virtues and restorative
water imagery.

As with American prose, the British poetry of the Great War
illustrates the evolution of rain water's symbolic qualities. Before the dying began en
masse, poets such as Rupert Brooke exploited water's traditional cleansing qualities. In
"Peace" (1914), the image of men going away to war is captured by the
baptismal-like image:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping. (146)

A "Morrisian" use of water imagery is in Wilfred
Owen's poem "From My Diary, July 1914" (written during the war). The poem is
exuberant in celebrating water's positive qualities and moreover life itself: "Lives
/ Wakening with wonder"; "Boys / Bursting the surface of the ebony pond";
"Fleshes / Gleaming with wetness" (117). Since this vital poem is purposefully
dated one month before the war began, it seems that Owen's poetic imagination was aware of
the way the Great War destroyed rain/water's positive symbolic qualities. This assertion
is borne out by a number of Owen's poems set after 1914 which link rain, water, and death.

One of Owen's most famous war poems, "Dulce Et Decorum
Est" details a gas attack. "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!" shouts a voice as the
men scramble for their masks (55). All but one get their masks on "just in
time." But the unfortunate one dies a slow death; occasion-ally "blood / Come[s]
gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs." Watery imagery is used to describe the
dying soldier as he is seen "as under a green sea." This indelible death scene
sticks in the speaker's mind: "In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He
plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning." An even more notable evocation of the
rain_death motif is in "Exposure." Here the speaker asks, "Is it that we
are dying?" Almost as if to answer the question before asking it, the speaker has
previously stated, "We only know war lasts, rain soaks" (48). Unfortunately for
Owen, the war did last. On 4 November 1918, one week before the Armistice was signed, he
was shot while assaulting a German position at Sambre Canal. In a strange convergence
between literature and life, Owen died at the "water's edge" (qtd. in Blunden
178).

While in the army Owen met Siegfried Sassoon. In addition to
their friendship, the soldier-poets share a common employment of the rain/water death
motif. But where Owen's imagery is delicate, Sassoon's is graphic. Take for instance
"The Effect": "'He'd never seen so many dead before.' / The lilting words
danced up and down his brain, / While corpses jumped and capered in the rain" (War
Poems 87). A crucial stanza in Sassoon's "The Death-Bed" makes a distinction
between different types of rain:

Rain—he could hear it rustling through the dark;
Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers
That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps
Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,
Gently and slowly washing life away. (52-53)

"We'd gained our first objective hours before" is
the cheery first line of "Counter-Attack." But gaining the first
"objective" was costly. A gruesome rain_death association is recorded as the
speaker surveys what happened "hours before":

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began, —the jolly old rain! (105-06)

Like Owen, Edmund Blunden was befriended by Sassoon, and, as
if to round out this poetic trinity, Blunden also employs the rain/water death motif. His
poems are littered with lines like "its rainy tortured blood" and "Where
the Yser at Dead End floated on its bloody / waters." "Third Ypres" is
Blunden's most vivid portrayal of the rain_death motif. The poem sketches Blunden's
experience during the British offensive of Passchendaele. As "Third Ypres"
alludes to Book VIII of Herodotus's Persian Wars, Blunden suggests the continuity of the
soldier's experience throughout the ages. The dramatic situations of the Greeks and the
British are similar: soldiers wait and are ill-informed. Groping for information about the
unseen Persian enemy, the Greeks consult the Oracle at Delphi. Musing about the fate of
those who have gone before him, the speaker of "Third Ypres" asks, ". . .
comes there no word / From those who swept through our new lines to flood / The lines
beyond?" he speculates that his predecessors are dead. Rain confirms their deaths:
"Then comes the black assurance, then the sky's / Mute misery lapses into trickling
rain." A pun creates the image of a steely artillery storm as "The second night
steals through the shrouding rain." As if to literally illustrate the Oracle's
warning that "Neither the head, nor the body is firm in its place" (Herodotus
550), there comes this desperate bleeding message by way of a British sergeant: "For
God's sake send and help us, / Here in a gunpit, all headquarters done for, / Forty or
more, the nine-inch came right through, / All splashed with arms and legs."
Reminiscent of the Oracle's "dark sweat horribly dripping," is this
impressionistic scene, "The light comes in with icy shock and the rain / Horribly
drips. Doctor, talk! talk! if dead." Much like Hemingway's, yet with more compulsion,
Blunden's perception of the past is altered by the Great War experience. His allusions to
an earlier age are undercut, severed, by ironical wet death images. While the Oracle
warned the heroic Greeks of "a fiery destruction," trench soldiers have to deal
with death by water and drowning in mud. In the muck at Passchendaele, the speaker of
"Third Ypres" consults the modern God only to find that "The rain is all
heaven's answer" (303-07).

The trench experience, with its watery death image, so
pervaded the contemporary British consciousness that it affected persons not directly
involved in combat. While ostensibly about rodents given to mass suicide in times of
over-population, John Masefield's "The Lemmings" is actually displaced trench
poetry. The six references to "Westward" suggest the soldier's slang phrase for
death, as a dead man was said to have "gone west." Also the time reference to
these mass suicides taking place "Once in a hundred years" is chronologically
analogous to the one hundred years of relative peace between the Napoleonic Wars and World
War I. Lastly, in asserting that "the little brains of all the Lemming Kings"
are responsible for the slaughter, rather than any instinctual Malthusian motive, the poem
assumes a distinctly human quality. "The Lemmings" is dominated by a drowning
image:

Once in a hundred years the Lemmings come
Westward, in search of food, over the snow;
Westward until the salt sea drowns them dumb;
Westward, till all are drowned, those Lemmings go.
Once, it is thought, there was a westward land
Now drowned where there was food for those starved things,
And memory of the place has burnt its brand
In the little brains of all the Lemming Kings.
Perhaps, long since, there was a land beyond
Westward from death, some city, some calm place
Where one could taste God's quiet and be fond
With the little beauty of a human face;
But now the land is drowned. Yet we still press
Westward, in search, to death, to nothingness. (216)

In summary, it has been shown that wet death imagery cuts
across national boundaries yet was employed with greater force by British authors. In
contrast to British troops, many of whom endured the war for over four years, members of
the American Expeditionary Force had a sense of missing the "real" war. Perhaps
taking President Wilson's claim that the U.S. was a "disinterested" Associate
Power a bit literally, some American soldiers had a curious feeling of being observers
rather than participants in the war. As Malcolm Cowley noted, even American combatants
"retained their curious attitude of non-participation, of being friendly visitors who
though they might be killed at any moment still had no share in what was taking
place" (qtd. in Carpenter 119). Potentially with both their individual and national
survival at stake, British trench poets were very much participants in the war, and thus
inclined to use wet death imagery with greater force than their American counterparts.
Fitzgerald is emblematic of this as he borrowed one of his most evocative wet death images
from the British trench poet Edward Thomas.5 In addition to national lines, the motif also
cuts across literary styles. Thus, the writings of an essentially traditional writer like
Sassoon (Bergonzi 92) and an early modernist like Hemingway exhibit the motif. I have
suggested that part of the explanation of the evolution of rain/water symbolism lies in
material circumstances, such as submarine warfare, trench conditions, and untimely storms.
Yet material conditions are not sufficient to account for the wet death motif. For a
fuller explanation it is helpful to recall that irony was a major literary trend arising
from the war (Fussell).6 As Frederick Manning wrote on the ironic nature of wartime
memory, "The mind, so delicately sensitive to the least vibration from the outer
world, no longer recorded it in the memory, unless it had some special relevance"
(22). The suggestion is that the shock which the writers felt when they expected to see
life-giving rain/water and instead saw rain, water, and death, led to an ironic imprint.
Especially ironic is the way Christianity revered rain water's life-giving qualities. For
a spiritual explanation of the image, it should be pointed out that several of the authors
link Christianity to wet death. Edmund Blunden wrote "The rain is all heaven's
answer" (303-07), while Eliot, who suffered a bout of atheism while writing "The
Waste Land," signals that the loss of faith in rain/water's life-giving qualities is
related to a loss of faith in God. This sequence of imagery, in which an inability to find
God is followed by a warning about water, is revealing: "I do not find / the Hanged
Man. Fear death by water" (31).7

This spiritual interpretation is particularly useful in
explaining those authors who most deliberately exploit, and seem almost obsessed with,
rain/water and death imagery. In the cases of Hemingway and Sassoon, linking rain, water,
and death in the heat of composition may have been a way of working off religious
frustration. In calculated defiance of the Christian God, Hemingway wrote "All
thinking men are atheists" (8). Hemingway's use of the prayer image, death, and water
are undeniably entwined in the following:

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the
morning against a wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There
were dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the
hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers
carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall
but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall.
Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When
they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.
(qtd. in Wilson 120)

While at the front Sassoon was tortured by a need for
religion and the simultaneous realization that institutionalized Christianity was not
fulfilling that need. Regarding the inadequacy of Christian dogma for front line soldiers,
Sassoon observed, "I never could find anyone who really got any value out of the
Christian theology out there." An unpublished poem in Sassoon's diary, "Via
Crucis," explicitly links rain, death, and God:

'Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood'.
Why should jolly soldier-boys complain?
God made these before the roofless Flood—
Mud and rain.
Mangling crumps and bullets through the brain,
Jesus never guessed them when He died.
Jesus had a purpose for His pain,
Ay, like abject beasts we shed our blood,
Often asking if we die in vain.
Gloom conceals us in a soaking sack—
Mud and rain. (Diaries 102)

The war experience mocked biblical tradition. In response,
Robert Graves lashed out, rather than submit to the tyranny of an unusable past, in his
poem entitled "After the Flood." Exemplifying the spiritual reaction so crucial
to understanding the wet death motif, Graves's title refers to the war as a
"Flood" as it harks back to the Bible. After having flooded the earth, God
created a rainbow to seal his promise that "I will recall the Covenant I have made
between me and you and all living beings, so that the waters shall never again become a
flood to destroy . . . " (New American Bible, Genesis 9:9). Several thousand years
later, Graves recalls this passage from Genesis with brutal irony:

God's rainbow is a glorious toy,
His wine a cheerful drink,
And since He chooses to destroy
Folk better dead, we wish Him joy,
While choking at the stink. (213-14)

After the war, Western civilization was gripped by what might
be termed an ideology of despair. It can be seen, then, that wet death imagery became a
crucial metaphor for expressing some of the particular horrors encountered in the Great
War "battlescape." Through identifying and interpreting the way in which the
Great War affected rain/water's symbolic qualities, a more complete understanding of how
the war generation made sense of its experience and, concomitantly, a fuller knowledge of
the war's impact upon Anglo-American thought is achieved. From a methodological
perspective, the wet death motif offers a path to the too seldom traversed intersection
where literature meets history. At one level the motif exemplifies the way in which
historical events impact upon literary symbols. Virginia Woolf's watery suicide can be
viewed as an affirmation, or literal enactment, of the cultural consensus on rain/water's
symbolic value which emerged from the Great War. Indeed, a case can be made that death by
water is the writer's death of the Twentieth Century: Hart Crane, John Berryman, Paul
Celan (Kelly). But the relationship between literature and history is a reciprocal one.
Eliot's poetry is a fine example of this reciprocity. April 1917 was a very
"cruel" month for the Allies. Huge losses to U-boats were accompanied by a
mutiny in the French Army and horrendous casualties in the air, which earned the month the
grim name of "Bloody April." The opening line of "The Waste Land" may
be rooted in this historical experience. Yet, when it is recalled that the final wet death
image in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was written three years before
the war in 1911, it seems that Eliot's literature anticipates history:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (3)

The historiography of the war also illustrates the
convergence of the disciplines. While documenting the war many historians have recorded
the motif and thereby invested their narratives with fuller meaning. To cite one example,
a recent work, Modern Times, mentions that "the calamitous battle of Passchendaele
ended in a sea of blood and mud" (Johnson 169). In this way, the wet death motif
illuminates how even the most scrupulously objective historical scholarship can be
"factionalized." Recognizing this leads to a better understanding of the
interdependence of present and past. For, in discovering the motif either in literary or
historical sources, we resuscitate our past and come to realize why the modern memory is,
in some ways, still haunted by the Great War's image of mucky, wet death.

NOTES

1While a detailed survey of pre-war usages of rain/water
imagery is beyond the scope of this essay, a few examples may, nevertheless, be helpful. A
soft pastoral British rain is evoked in the opening line of the "General
Prologue" to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which reads, "Whan that Aprill with his
shoures soote." Writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
William Blake emphasized rain/water's life-giving qualities in his poem entitled
"Milton": "To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination. / To bathe
in the Waters of life; to wash off the Not Human." Wordsworth echoed biblical
sentiments when he wrote "From Heaven a general blessing; timely rains." After
the killing of the Albatross in Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,"
the sailors suffer from a lack of drinking water: "Water, water, every where, / Nor
any drop to drink." Eventually, regenerative rains fall and contribute to what Maud
Bodkin has termed the "Rebirth Archetype" in "The Ancient Mariner."

2Hemingway's naming his protagonist Frederick Henry sounds
like an ironical "hybridization" of Stephen Crane's heroic Henry Fleming. The
protagonist in Hemingway's posthumously published The Garden of Eden is most likely a
tribute to Frederic Manning's stoical hero, Bourne, in The Middle Parts of Fortune.

3One wonders what Catherine would have had to say about acid
rain.

4Another wet death scene involves Chrisfield, who, since the
novel's start, has had an abrasive relationship with his superior, Lieutenant Anderson. In
France, both Chrisfield and Anderson are separated from their units. They meet. Alone and
wounded, Anderson does not immediately recognize Chrisfield: "Give me some water,
buddy," he asks. Chrisfield complies. Anderson "drank greedily, spilling the
water over his chin and his wounded arm." Chrisfield walks away and then hurls a
grenade, which kills the wet lieutenant. "A thick rain of yellow leaves came
down" is employed to describe the aftermath of the explosion. As if to dramatically
emphasize the rain_death link, "A few drops of rain were falling," and then
"The rain beat hard."

5The "Blessed are the dead" line resembles line
seven of Edward Thomas's "Rain": "Blessed are the dead that the rain rains
upon."

6A precise page notation is not needed since the irony
argument is at the core of the book.

7Eliot, of course, also associates dryness with death in
"The Waste Land."

NOTE: The author would like to thank Michael Adas, Scott
Cook, Paul Fussell, Lord Gardner, and Nella Navarro for their encouragement and criticism
in writing this essay.

WORKS CITED

Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1984.